Do I Misunderstand?

General Discussion
1

Dear Activision Blizzard King,

My current understanding of the state of Warcraft 3 (based on rumors and leaks) is as follows:

  • You took preorders for the game without telling the developers who were actually on the team working on it
  • In their scramble to release the game, the developers replaced the game menu with a web page
  • You replaced the Frozen Throne working game that users had enjoyed for 18 years with this web page version
  • The web page was obfuscated JavaScript but internally included unfinished work on the missing features, like Ranked Play
  • You disbanded the team of people who created the web page menu
  • You allowed a third party run by users (who wanted to actually enjoy their 18 year old game again) to create a third party hack of your web page “game” that had the features you were not willing to provide – like Ranked Play – which in many cases were those features you deleted during the forced update from the prior game version
  • You ignored when the thirty party service told all their users you could no longer be trusted for high performance gaming and rerouted their hack of your web page game to only log into their third party server instead, including convincing their userbase to enter Battle.net login credentials into an unofficial third party login prompt
  • You ignored the featureset of the game for about a year and a half (because you had already disbanded the team working on it)
  • During this time, players who wanted to play competitively fled to that third party hack of your new game, probably leaving predominantly custom gamers on your actual live client (this is my speculation - maybe not accurate data?)
  • You let the last man standing from the old team push out an experimental unfinished patch from years before for the sake of claiming to have added “Ranked Play” as if to win back those players who you had lost to the superior-functioning third party hack client
  • The unfinished patch literally went live with bugs such as “Wins deduct from your rank and/or count as losses” as well as wreaking major havoc on custom games and making the World Editor literally just crash on basic UI functions that it had for 20 years and even in the Reforged version
  • Your former employee(s) who worked on this game and actually want to play it may be starting to advocate the production of a “Warcraft 3 Custom Edition” where now they are saying they can take an old pre-Reforged game version that isn’t a web page and finally add the Reforged modding APIs to it so that the remaining custom gamers stuck on your current live game version have an escape route to go back to enjoying a stable working game

Do I misunderstand? Are you intentionally choosing the pathway to a future where the world itself wrests control of this game from your company and all remaining players move to a superior and more stable third party server for each of their various use cases of the game?
What’s next for you, are you going to shut down Classic World of Warcraft and declare that the World of Warcraft is not a mobile enough product for your company so you don’t really want to deal with it anymore?

I know this is very much an opinion piece, and maybe a piece of my mind, but I was wondering if you could post some positive news for this game that would indicate that you prefer your users to use the official game over a third party knockoff server, such as an indication that your company has some manner of interest in running the game better than what hackers and third parties can do. I mean, as a concerned customer, if you actually were faithfully going to make an effort towards this end I would be made happy if you succeeded and I want to continue to use the official game version if possible!!

3 Likes
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I just wanted to play the campaign (I imagine the easiest thing to not break since there is no new net code, the changes to the campaign while cool, are something you do on the editor, so no new features that can cause issues, etc) and even that crashes… smh

1 Like
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Turn your spell effects to low. Do not load from a checkpoint.

4

Just wanted to add a few points:

  • They changed RoC Balance to TFT Balance while not fixing the problems (like most RoC Levels had no proper difficulty levels)

  • They butchered iconic Game Scenes like after the Culling when Arthas raises his hand “I hunt to the ends of the world. Did you hear me. To the ends of t he earth.” Arthas stands there motionless; pretty much ruining the atmosphere of the game. Even though I saw a YouTube Video where the Scene had been reworked with proper animations, but was cut out of the final game for whatever reason.

  • Put in Ranked Play and Campaign Changes which do not work or just crash the game under certain circumstances, pissing of loyal fans who only want to play the game it was meant to be played.

  • And finally they let fans wait for 2(!!) years to finally put the buggy features into the game while everyone thought they just abandoned the game

  • War3 had 20th anniversary in July and NOBODY did anything about it. No event. No Blog Post. At least Samwise did post something on Twitter.

This is just such a shame. Sadge. I hope they fix the game (and i think they will eventually but this will take some time). No blue post so far…

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1.33 contains a complete re-balance of RoC.

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Sure these kinds of things happened, but those are more like developer decisions on the front lines made by people who probably are no longer with the company. I guess while we could nitpick individual game implementation choices, I was more interested in the aggregate and the management decisions and what those resulted in.

Edit:

Again, you’re not wrong, but I feel this is somewhat off-topic and detracts from my main point about the management direction this game is going. Historically on a game with a map editor like this, if you wanted Arthas to waive his hammer then you could open the campaign mission in World Editor and tell him to waive his hammer during this scene.
As Blizzard moves towards a future where there is no scene because the game or World Editor has encountered a fatal application error and is no longer running, it kind of does not matter what visual scene or experience was actually intended to begin with, nor even whether I thought I could fix it in a map editor.

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mmm no one? And it’s not a joke.

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When they started making balance patches and changes to reforged, they introduced a bug where RoC players were matching TFT players in ladder.

Instead of fixing the issue, they simply deleted Reign of Chaos and came up with an excuse saying how it is cost heavy to keep the Reign of Chaos servers alive.

What a bunch of lying incompetent losers.

RoC ladder games were 11% of all ladder games in WarCraft III and had one of the most unique communities out of any gaming platforms out there, but Blizzard never did anything to fix that.

Now patch after patch they introduce more issues than fixes without any proper communication.

9

Thanks, I could finally finish that mission after doing this but… so sad you have to do this just to finish the game. xD

1 Like
10

Nope you dont misunderstand… you pretty much nailed it.

the fact that they wont even acknowledge the current problems the game has is infuriating.

I for one am never buying another blizzard or activision product ever again.

11

Why you hating on w3champions so much. Their source code is public. What they use the battlenet credentials for is public. All their coding is public. Why are you painting them as villains

Also I just wanna add that blizz completely destroyed the games balance as well. Games in a really bad state right now.

2 Likes
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One of the first things I see on their github is some blabbering about the need for a private submodule that you can only get by being in their organization:

There is a private submodule that is needed for color switch and skins, you need to be in the w3c org to see that.

The existence of a better third party solution to the game than what the game itself offers makes it harder for Blizzard to make any attempt to update and fix things.

13

um on what planet?

maybe if blizzard did their job in the first place, or second place, or third place… then maybe the playerbase wouldnt have to come up with its own solution to make the game playable?

seriously makes me wonder what type of person you have to be to be making excuses for the laziest and most incompetent team of developers to ever collect a paycheque

14

Your upsetness has blinded you and you are treating false information as though it were truth, by way of exaggeration. In this world, I am almost certain there are human beings who are more lazy and less competent than anyone who ever touched Reforged – and who still received paycheck(s).

But I understand that you are upset. At times, the state of the Warcraft III game technology causes me to feel a little upset.

When I say that having a better 3rd party solution out there for basic game functions (than Blizzard can itself provide) is a big problem for Blizzard’s future ability to fix the game, I am saying that I believe this social circumstance puts them less in charge of the game (to some degree). For example, for a time I imagined that I might apply to the open position at Activision Blizzard King that includes “full stack of Warcraft III remaster” in its job description, and then I could try to work at this company to improve Warcraft III: Reforged.

But no matter who I am, nor how skilled I am, the thought of it began to fill me with a sense of existential dread that the social circumstances are beginning to create a future where this problem cannot be solved. The new Reforged “Ranked Ladder” is bad because society has W3Champions to compare it to. Even if I worked at Blizzard and tried to fight upstream against the management to implement a 1:1 replica of W3Champions into the official client, in the end W3Champions would just update and make something better than what my managers would allow me to create. As people who care more about that, W3Champions can always win unless their power is taken away, because they will always have more time and money to care about the game whereas Blizzard is mostly a WoW MMO shop moving towards becoming a mobile game studio, and probably doesn’t have that kind of time and money to dedicate to a ladder. I start to feel it actually wouldn’t matter even if someone who wanted to care worked there – surely that couldn’t be enough, unless they had it in them to assimilate all the skillsets of all the people who worked on W3Champions.

So i was coming to terms with the inevitable. Does that tell you what kind of person I am?

15

This was a design decision. You make it sound bad but it didn’t have to be. Web UIs are easily changeable and updateable, if implemented properly.

I say this becuase in your history of folly, you seemed really fixated on this “wepbage game” thing. I’m not saying it was done really well here or anything, but web UIs aren’t inherently bad, it wasn’t something that couldn’t have been done well and it is really a minor issue in the grand scheme of things.

Heck, it’s one of the reasons W3C was able to do what it was- the web UI system made it easy for them to put their own UI in for their own thing.